Once Just a Punch Line, Buffalo Fights Back

A waterfront grain elevator, monument to Buffalo’s industrial past, forms a backdrop for a dancing class.Credit
Dan Cappellazzo for The New York Times

BUFFALO — When he was recruited to help turn 120 acres of this city’s underperforming downtown into a jobs-producing campus for medical research, education and clinical care, Matt Enstice was among the few who did not consider the plan a joke.

And Mr. Enstice knows jokes. Before he returned to his hometown, where he became president and chief executive of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the nonprofit group overseeing the development, Mr. Enstice spent five years in New York in the late 1990s helping Lorne Michaels produce “Saturday Night Live.”

Mr. Enstice, who turns 40 next month, also knows Buffalo, a recovering Great Lakes city that peaked in population and prosperity 60 years ago.

“When I came back, it felt different than when I left,” Mr. Enstice said. “I’m an optimist by nature. People my age were returning to the city. I could see the potential for what’s happened.”

On a bright summer morning, Mr. Enstice bounds across a medical campus that has huffed and growled with construction for a decade, and never more intensely than this year. Work just started on a $100 million, 287,000-square-foot medical office building. Two blocks away, excavators prepare the site of the $243 million, 410,000-square-foot Women and Children’s Hospital.

In the fall, construction starts on two more buildings: the $375 million, 500,000-square-foot State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; and the $40 million, 142,000-square foot Roswell Park Cancer Institute. The four buildings, which total 1.34 million square feet and a $758 million investment, are to be completed over the next three years.

Leveraging the medical research and education campus as an economic development strategy was the brainchild of the previous mayor, Anthony M. Masiello. His successor, Mayor Byron W. Brown, directed his economic development aides to support the project with city funds, fast-track permits, and business and professional recruitment.

Brendan R. Mehaffy, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning, said the Buffalo Niagara campus was encouraging the construction of new hotels, retail space and luxury residential development. Home prices in the neighborhoods closest to the campus have risen 15 percent in the last two years, according to the city’s latest real estate figures.

“There’s been a decade of focused work here to redevelop the city,” said Mr. Mehaffy. “You can see the results now really coming out of the ground. We have $1.7 billion in projects either announced this year or under construction in Buffalo. We haven’t experienced anything like this kind of interest and investment in generations. I grew up in one of our suburbs. I can tell you, it’s amazing to see this transition in downtown.”

Almost half of those projects are part of the medical campus, which is bordered east to west by Main Street and Michigan Avenue, and north to south by North and Goodell Streets. A decade ago, the parcel was a smattering of shuttered brick warehouses and manufacturing buildings, weed-scattered parking lots and deteriorated turn-of-the-20th-century housing. It was, in short, 20 square blocks that fit right in to the rest of Buffalo.

Photo

The future rises nearby, in a building on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.Credit
Dan Cappellazzo for The New York Times

In 2006, the campus’s first new building — the $24 million Hauptman-Woodward Research Institute for structural biology — was finished, with 73,000 square feet. Last year, three more projects were completed: a $291 million research and clinical care building that houses the Gates Vascular Institute and the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Clinical and Translational Research Center (475,000 square feet in 10 stories); the $64 million 300-bed HighPointe on Michigan skilled nursing center (202,000 square feet); and a $37 million, 2,000-space parking deck.

The Medical Campus now employs 12,000 people, with possibly thousands more once another phase of development is finished about four years from now.

It has been a long time since people felt anything about Buffalo’s downtown other than dismay. The city, which dates to a frontier outpost in 1789, opened a 125-year period of industrial expansion and population growth in 1825 with the completion of the Erie Canal. The channel, 40 feet wide and four feet deep, linked the Hudson River with Lake Erie and made Buffalo a hub of manufacturing and commodities transport.

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The city’s economy, and the development of thriving arts and cultural institutions, was considerably strengthened after engineers opened the world’s first hydroelectric power plant at nearby Niagara Falls in 1895. By 1950, Buffalo was home to 580,000 residents, the highest its population ever reached.

The final decades of the last century left the city at its bleakest, with huge job losses, residential migration to the suburbs and stubbornly high rates of poverty, even as city leaders and residents tried to reverse the decline.

In 1985, for instance, Buffalo completed a light rail transit line that originally had 15 stations and runs 6.4 miles between the city’s harbor and the Buffalo Sabres’ ice arena, and the south campus of SUNY at Buffalo. The last 1.2 miles of the transit line, which cost $535 million then, run above ground along the Main Street pedestrian mall that was established in 1986, a year after the rail system opened.

Neither the mall nor the transit line could forestall the population losses, which averaged 5,300 residents a year. (The city is rebuilding Main Street to restore vehicular traffic.)

The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus embraced a strategy adopted by other postindustrial cities, embarking on projects in clumps rather than in larger endeavors. Buffalo’s Larkin District, named for a soap manufacturer in the city’s southeast, provides another example.

Howard A. Zemsky, who spent much of his career as an executive with Russer Foods, one of the country’s largest processors of delicatessen meats, before he became a prominent developer here, converted an old warehouse to commercial office space. Since then, he has purchased and renovated four more buildings nearby, one of which serves as headquarters for First Niagara Bank.

Mr. Zemsky, the principal of Larkin Development Group, also built Larkin Square, a collection of restaurants and covered outdoor seating areas and event stages at the intersection of Swan and Seneca Streets that has quickly become a popular gathering place. The total investment for 685,000 square feet was $50 million, he said.

Mr. Zemsky’s work attracted the attention of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who appointed him co-chairman of the Western New York Regional Economic Development Council, one of nine such regional groups. Last year, the state committed $1 billion in tax incentives and grants for Buffalo’s development, spending supervised by the council that Mr. Zemsky heads with Satish K. Tripathi, president of the University at Buffalo.

The first investment under the “Billion for Buffalo” program is a grant to spend $15 million to build a new 40,000-square-foot laboratory at the medical campus, and $35 million more to equip it for high-tech companies, among them the Albany Molecular Research Institute, a contract pharmaceutical and biotechnology research and manufacturing company that Mr. Enstice helped to recruit.

A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2013, on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Just a Punch Line, Buffalo Fights Back. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe